Wanted (6 page)

Danny rushed on through the ticket office, past the creepers and curling timetables on its cracked, weather-beaten walls. Then on down into the car park at the front of the station. There, up ahead, was the old entrance to the town. His muscles were aching, screaming, but he could not afford to slow. Not out in the open. Seeing his own shadow running before him, he inwardly cursed the brightness of the moonlight. Danger pulsed through him. Adrenalin flowed. He wondered,
What if I’ve already been seen?
If he had, he’d know soon enough. Or, rather, he wouldn’t. Because he’d be dead.

Using whatever cover he could – saplings, overturned bins and skeletal cars, each stripped down, twisted and cannibalized for parts by whichever crazed criminals and professional looters had been high, greedy or desperate enough to plunder a hot spot – he made it as far as the railway station gates.

He stopped there, breathless, and hunkered down low. He checked the open street beyond: more desolation and decay; a row of shops with cracked windows; a tree growing up tall through the busted windscreen of a rusted bus in the middle of the road.

But he saw no threats. No people. No life. Not even a stray dog or a rat. The only heat signature his goggles picked up now was of Spartak forty metres away.

The howling wind continued to blow. Ice-cold rain drilled down. Didn’t matter how tight you wrapped yourself up against the elements, water always got in. The same cold water that could seep down granite crevices, expand and crack them apart, trickled down his neck now.

And while he wouldn’t normally have given a damn, with his Geiger counter still high in the red, each fresh blast of wind and cold drop of rain came at him like a forceful tap on the shoulder, reminding him that he and the others were at risk of contamination too.

‘Tut,’
Danny said into his mike, meaning he was now in position.

‘Tut,’
the three others echoed. They were awaiting his orders.

The building Danny had travelled all this way for was now less than four hundred metres away. According to the basic commercial satellite images he’d studied, and the limited reliable map work available for the area, he’d concluded it was an abandoned telephone exchange, which had once been the town’s main employer.

He and the others had been over their plan of attack a dozen times already. Attack? He hoped it came to that. There was still the grim possibility that the birds he’d come here to capture had already flown.

Of the unit of six mercenaries who’d assassinated the Georgian-sympathizing UN peace envoy in London ten days ago, there were now only three left alive: their leader, known only as Glinka, and on whom Danny had so far been able to turn up zero intelligence; his woman, a blonde, whose face he would never forget; and Adam Fitch, a.k.a. ‘The Kid’.

Until ten days ago, Danny would have described the Kid as one of only three people left alive whom he’d have trusted with his life. Until the moment when the Kid had pulled a Glock 18 machine pistol on him and had told him that, unless he stole the secret locations of six smallpox vials from Colonel Nikolai Zykov’s office in London’s Russian Embassy, he would execute Danny and his daughter.

Danny had done what Glinka and the Kid had asked of him. But instead of being released, as he had been promised, he and his daughter had been handed over to three cold stone-eyed killers, whose job it had been to get rid of them in any way they saw fit.

Things hadn’t worked out like that. The three men who’d been left to murder Danny and Lexie had ended up dead themselves.

Danny had made sure that the last of them to die, the torturer who’d planned to practise his despicable art on Danny and Lexie, had told him everything he knew during the final, prolonged and increasingly agonizing moments of his life.

He had confessed that certain elements of the Georgian Secret Service had paid Glinka to assassinate the UN peace envoy and blame it on Colonel Zykov so that the UN would perceive this as an act of Russian aggression and would therefore once more demand the withdrawal of Russian troops from the former Georgian border territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The dying man had also told him that Glinka had set Danny up to take the blame for the London massacre and assassination so that he could publicly run him through the televised, police-choked streets of London, like a fox before a baying pack of hounds. Danny would gain international media attention and condemnation for the terrorist atrocity, and occupy the cops long enough for the real killers to get clean away.

The torturer had told him, too, about the smallpox. About how, after selecting Zykov to take the fall for the assassination – he was a high-standing member of the Russian Embassy staff in London – Glinka had recognized him as the same scarred soldier who’d raided the Biopreparat chemical-weapons facility at which Glinka had been stationed as a guard back in 1990.

Glinka knew Zykov had stolen the smallpox all those years ago and had decided that, as well as framing him for the assassination, he would take it for himself by torturing Zykov to discover the vials’ current whereabouts.

The last thing the dying torturer had told Danny was what had brought him to this wasteland: the date and the GPS coordinates of where the torturer had intended to meet up with Glinka, the blonde and the Kid.

Namely here.

Tonight.

Bang centre in the deadliest part of the Zone.

‘Move, Two and Three,’ Danny said in Ukrainian.

He pictured the twins – silent, lethal – moving like missiles towards their target.

He began counting down from thirty.

The plan was for the twins to close in on the abandoned telephone exchange from the north and the west. Danny and Spartak would move in from the east and the south. Danny wanted them to surround the building simultaneously, which meant the twins needed a small head start.

Tensing, ready to go, he again scoped the streets and buildings for signs of life. Still nothing moved. The one advantage to being in a hot spot like this: he didn’t have to worry about the law. Even the MVS and the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service, whose job it was to police the Zone, kept away.

Because only a madman would set foot there voluntarily. Only a madman or someone out to catch one.

Rain beads zigzagged across Danny’s goggles. Scoping the street again, he noticed his hands were trembling for the first time since he’d said goodbye to Lexie three days ago. He’d finally got her somewhere he was still praying was safe.

Concentrate on here, on now, he ordered himself. Not on Lexie. Not on then. Concentrate on getting your team in and out alive. Concentrate on doing what you do best.

But he knew that this wasn’t what he did best. What he did best was prepare and strategize, leaving nothing to chance. That was why he was good at his job: he never went into anything he didn’t know his way back out of. The same as anyone else in his line of work. Anyone who wanted to stay alive.

But tonight he was barely prepared at all. Spartak had seen to their equipment and weapons, and Danny hardly knew the other half of his team. And only had the most basic intel on where they were heading. Not even a floor plan for the telephone exchange. No surveillance. No knowledge of what weaponry, or how many people – if any – might be waiting inside.

Which was maybe the real reason he was trembling now, he thought. His whole life he’d been one of the good guys, with the might of government and all its resources at his back. Now that safety net had been ripped away. For the first time, Danny Shanklin was operating on the wrong side of international law.

Ten, nine, eight . . .

Danny wanted this done with now. He could feel his energy levels dropping. Hardly surprising. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had more than two hours’ straight sleep. And Spartak, even though he’d never admit it, would by now be tiring too. They’d marched five and a half kilometres to get there tonight, having first penetrated the Zone’s security perimeter on foot. They’d had no choice. If the people he’d come for really were there, they’d be on the lookout for approaching vehicles.

He forced himself to sharpen up and focus on what was to come.

He told himself that soon there would be blood.

Three, two . . .

The thirty seconds was up. And so was Danny. Mobile. Out through the gates, then heading right, sticking as close to the deserted buildings as he could. He sprinted up the street, counting off the alleyways either side, relieved to find their spacing matched the Soviet map of the area he’d memorized that morning.

‘One – move in,’ he radioed, unleashing Spartak too.

Danny switched left into the fifth alley. More of a side-street, he saw, as he raced on past a dozen arched wooden doorways set into a crumbling grey brick wall. A forgotten place. Gutters hanging at crazy angles. Blistered paintwork. A rusted tangle of bikes. Faded signs for cobblers, mechanics and furniture repairs.

At the end of the street, grim as a Gothic castle in a rainstorm, the two-storey utilitarian concrete block of the abandoned telephone exchange loomed into sight. In between lay what had once been a municipal car park, but which looked now like a junk yard full of abandoned cars.

Danny slunk into the shadows of a stack of warped pallets and peered through the dripping rotten slats. He scoped the exchange and the ivy-snaked buildings around it. Dark, empty windows stared blankly back.

He felt it then. In spite of his exhaustion. The same buzz of imminent action he had always felt at times like this, as if he’d been strangely transmogrified and was now a spider sensing a twitch at its web or a wolf picking up the scent of freshly spilled blood . . .

He moved swiftly to the edge of the car park, keeping low, edging along a row of corroded cars. Peering through the lashing rain as it rattled like hail across the car roofs, he scoped the surrounding buildings again. Moving forward, he felt the ground shifting beneath his feet, growing softer, turning from concrete into dirt and mud.

He slowed, no longer just worrying about threats from above and around but searching warily beneath him. As he kept edging forward, his eyes sifted through the green darkness for telltale signs of surveillance and IEDs: trip-wires, plastics and recently dug patches in the ground.

He hoped to hell he’d find none. Not because he couldn’t circumnavigate them but because failing to have laid out perimeter defences would indicate that Glinka wasn’t expecting unwanted visitors. Which would mean that, even if he’d guessed Danny and Lexie had escaped being executed in England, he didn’t think Danny had the knowledge, means or determination to come hunting for him here.

‘Always credit your enemy with greater intelligence than yourself.’ One of Danny’s father’s favourite sayings. One that would cost Glinka his liberty and even his life, if it turned out he’d ignored it now.

‘Tut,’
Danny hissed into his mike. He was now in position less than twenty metres from the exchange.

Then he froze.

Something wasn’t right. Something in his field of vision. At first he couldn’t see what it was. His goggles revealed no thermal traces, nothing living, as he slowly scoped the buildings and surrounding cars, hunting for glimmers of red.

Yet something had snagged his attention.

Just in time, he saw what it was. A sliver of vehicle ten metres to his right up ahead. Something about its shape was all wrong. He edged closer, widening the angle between himself and it as he did so. There, he saw confirmation of what his peripheral vision had flagged up.

The vehicle’s black paintwork was rust-free and glinted slick as spilt oil in the moonlight. He recognized the model as well. A Honda SUV. A shape not even dreamed of when Chernobyl had gone up and the people who’d lived there had fled.

A click. A hum. Light blazed down.

Danny shut his eyes just before his goggles massively magnified the intensity of the sodium searchlight on the Honda’s roof. He crash-rolled left, between two hulks of cars, then flattened, tearing the goggles from his eyes, blinking in frustration as retinal flashes flickered over his vision.

The world swung back into focus as the first boot thumped down out of the Honda. The remote possibility that some civilian might be there on legitimate business vanished, as whoever it was took off right, racing away from the Honda towards the row of decrepit vehicles beyond.

He swung his AK-9 round and snapped off a shot. But his vision wasn’t up to it. He missed.

The weapon’s sound suppressor kept the noise down to a
phut.
The round, though, pinged off the hubcap of the van the Honda guy had just darted behind and echoed into the night.

He rolled left again, then spidered, crawled, crouched and finally ran. He had to get away from the last position he’d been in. Flank the guy quick and he’d still be in with a chance.

He moved just in time. A drumming sound, louder, harder than the rain. A skittering of metal on metal. Rounds fired from another silenced weapon ripped into the car he had been hiding behind, sparking off its metal and thumping into the dirt all around it.

A high cyclic rate. An assault rifle, Danny guessed. If he’d stayed where he was, he would have been ripped in two.

He dropped low and rolled – once, twice – in rapid succession across the gap between the rows of cars. Thank God for the wind and the rain, and that whoever he was up against had a silencer fitted too. Whoever was inside that telephone exchange might not yet have realized what was going on.

But Danny knew that the Honda guy more than likely had comms: every passing second was a widening of their window of opportunity to call in and raise the alarm.

‘Danny?’

He heard Spartak’s voice in his earbead. The big guy must have heard him panting and known something was awry. He ignored him. Spartak was too far away to help him now.

Movement. Due south. Danny was staring through the slit beneath the corroded bottom of the car he was lying beside and the ground. Two cars further away, almost merging into blackness beside a flattened tyre, a new shape had just emerged into the grain of the driving rain.